In Tat’iana’s dream, one of the most famous in Russian literature, Onegin takes the form of a bear, chases her across a snowy landscape, then appears as the “master” (“khoziain”) of a gang of grotesque wild animals which terrify her. Onegin is at this moment both dear and frightful to Tat’iana (“mil i strashen ei”)—an indication of her ambivalence. She desires him, but fears terrible consequences. She is laboring under what psychoanalysts would recognize as the infantile conception of sex as a terrible act of violence.34 Yet she then permits the “master” to take her to a bench, deposit her there, and start to make love to her, and would without objection have allowed him to take away her virginity were it not for the fact that two other characters suddenly enter upon the scene.35
From the dream it is clear that Tat’iana wants Onegin to master her sexually. But in reality he is the master of her fate. By means of the love letter she throws herself at him, and it is then up to him to decide what will become of her. Because he rejects her, her sud’ba is to marry another man, an honorable man, yet a man she does not love, a man by whom (as Rozanov observes) she apparently has no children. It is as if Onegin were her father who, in the venerable Russian tradition, marries off his daughter to some stranger.
Indeed, Onegin is more of a parental figure than his Byronic, worldly-wise image would suggest. Tat’iana makes him a parent by her insistently childlike stance.36 Her love is not that of a sophisticated coquette, it is no game. Rather, it is innocent, trusting. In love Tat’iana is as dependent as a child: “Tatiana… unconditionally yields/to love like a dear child [kak miloe ditia].”37 When she tries, naively, to explain her feelings for Onegin to her old nurse, she fails. The nurse thinks that she is ill. Repeatedly referring to Tat’iana as “my child” (“ditia moe”), the nurse tries to take care of her, as a solicitous mother would (the office of nurse or “niania” was the typical means of parent-surrogation among the nineteenth-century Russian nobility).
In frustration Tat’iana sharply orders the nurse out of the room, and commences to write the love letter already quoted above. If the nurse does not understand, perhaps Onegin will. One parental figure is replaced by another.
But, although Tat’iana is willing to play the child, Onegin plays at best a very distant and inadequate parent. After receiving the letter he comes to her in the family garden and commences to deliver a cold, standoffish sermon. Tat’iana, a “humble little girl” (“smirennoi devochki”) “humbly” (“smirenno”) hears out the lesson of Pushkin’s pseudomature, narcissistic hero.38 She is in tears as he escorts her back to her mother. She will be unhappy for the rest of the novel, indeed she will cherish her secret unhappiness for the rest of her life. That is her sud’ba, and it is Onegin—she believes—who has determined that sud’ba.
Even when Onegin comes crawling back to Tat’iana in the end there is no change in her attitude. She admits that she still loves him, but she is now properly married (to a man she does not love) and will not be unfaithful. More important, her sud’ba had been decided by his response to her initial, abject declaration of love to him. She now is even grateful to him for the way he behaved:
Again, it is her soul, her Russian “dusha” which accepts the abjection. What is more, she would still prefer that he be the strict disciplinarian with her:
How can he be the slave (“Byt’ chuvstva melkogo rabom”) when sud’ba has already determined that she be the slave? No, she will remain severed from him, as he had originally decided (“You must,/I pray you, leave me”). She would rather be enslaved by the memory of a lost, inadequate object than gain a present object. She would prefer that Onegin be dead for her, as is her poor nurse (“niania”), the mother-surrogate whom he had replaced, and who now sleeps in the “humble churchyard” near her childhood home.
Vasilii Grossman’s Thousand-Year-Old Slave
Vasilii Grossman (1905–64) was a writer very much preoccupied with the notion of fate (sud’ba, rok). His novel Life and Fate (Zhizn’ i sud’ba, 1980) offers a panoramic view of the sometimes intersecting, sometimes parallel fates of its countless characters—Russians and Germans, Jews and Gentiles, soldiers and civilians, the living and the dead. Grossman has been called the Soviet Tolstoy, and Life and Fate is regarded by some as the War and Peace of the twentieth century.
But it is Grossman’s incomparably pessimistic novella Forever Flowing (Vse techet, first published abroad in 1970) that is relevant here. In this work Grossman explicitly connects the idea of fate to Russian masochism.
In several chapters toward the end of the work the reader encounters Grossman’s somewhat loose but fascinating theses concerning “the myth of Russian national character” and “the fate [rok] and character of Russian history.”43 According to Grossman’s narrator, “inexorable repression of the individual personality” and “slavish subjugation [kholopskoe podchinenie] of the individual personality to the sovereign and to the state” accompanied the “thousand-year history of the Russians.” This external force produced a Christian strength and purity of national character that was unlike anything in the West. Russian observers, such as Chaadaev, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, had understood this, and had honestly believed that Russia would eventually have something very special to offer to the West. But they had not understood something else, namely, that “the characteristics of the Russian soul were born not of freedom, that the Russian soul is a thousand-year-old slave. And what could a thousand-year-old slave give to the world…?”44
Grossman’s ideas of “Russian soul” and “thousand-year-old slave” are personifications of the Russian people. They are not persons, properly speaking, but they resemble persons. They are metaphors for the many submissive persons in Russia, or for the submissive characters in Grossman’s novel. For example, the “thousand-year-old slave” is like the character Nikolai Andreevich, a Soviet scientist whose “entire life consisted of one long act of obedience, with no trace of disobedience.”45